ScreenWize

Young bride-to-be Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) has a dream (queue music). She wants to get married knowing who her real dad is. She has uncovered the diary of her free-spirit mother Donna (Meryl Streep) which lists three possibilities, heartbreaker Sam (Pierce Brosnan), writer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) and headbanger-turned-uptight executive Harry (Colin Firth), but the diary doesn’t give a definitive answer and so she invites all three to give her away at her wedding, assuming she will know her dad when she meets him. With this yawn of a plot, thus begins Mama Mia!, the big screen adaptation of the hit musical fashioned around the songs of ABBA.

The thing about ABBA, and let me disclose up front that I am and will always be an ABBA fan until the bitter end, is that when they were good they were very very good, and when they were bad, they were horrid. Very much the same can be said of Mama Mia!

The fault, I believe, lays squarely with director Phyllida Lloyd, whose background is in theatre (she directed the Broadway run of the play). Every scene is performed with the subtlety of an old stage hoofer playing to the cheap seats. Every dance, every costume, is straight out of any high school play. Under a stronger director with a sense of subtlety, we might have a film every bit as enduring as last year’s Hairspray. Instead we have some of the (Western) world’s finer actors making utter pratts of themselves. None of the male leads should ever let their friends convince them they can hold a note.

But their vocal crimes are nothing compared to the ham-fisted overacting of the normally faultless Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, as Donna’s two best friends. Between them there is, at times, such high levels of oestrogen coming from the screen (and perhaps from my mums-and-bubs-audience) that I felt myself getting hot flushes from HRT-by-proxy.

Meryl Streep, however, gives the film her all and she is nothing short of spectacular.

And then, there are those wonderful ABBA tunes.

Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (who produced the film along with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson) wrote some of pop’s more bittersweet songs, and under their tutelage, Meryl Streep manages to take a classic like The Winner Takes It All and, singing it in the golden light of the beautiful Greek locations, give it a new life and poignancy.

I liken watching Mama Mia! to watching your favourite aunt drunk and dancing at a wedding. You know it’s embarrassing to watch, but you can’t help smiling and clapping along.

CK

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon